Unless you've been living under a rock with no connection to the Internet, you've probably heard of this music genre called rap; it's pretty popular in our generation. If you've managed to be conscious of this genre, I'm sure you've heard of the rapper Kendrick Lamar and his first hit single "Swimming Pools (Drank)." You might've heard it on the radio a couple years ago, or maybe at a house party while playing some Flip Cup.

What comes to mind when you think of this song? Drinking? Alcohol? The lyrics, "First you get a swimming pool full of liquor, then you dive in it"? On a surface level, this song comes off as a typical shallow rap song that only encourages getting as drunk as you possibly can along with smoking weed until you're high out of your mind. That's funny because Lamar actually tries to convey a message with this song. It acts as a commentary on his own experience with alcohol, and his take on how alcoholism is so prevalent in society. You probably wouldn't think that if you just sang along with the chorus, now would you? Let's take a deeper look.

In the hook, Kendrick summarizes the typical college shindig:

"Pour up (drank), head shot (drank),
Sit down (drank), stand up (drank),
Pass out (drank), wake up (drank),
Faded (drank), faded (drank)."

You know the party isn't a party unless there's alcohol, right? And it doesn't start until the alcohol is poured. So you and your friends start it off with some shots to pre-game. You all have cups in hand, of course (because you would get looked at funny if you didn't,) and thus keep drinking throughout the party, sitting down and standing up and chatting. You get progressively more drunk until you inevitably pass out. You then wake up to a horrible hangover that convinces you to never drink again. (Just kidding, you're gonna do this again next weekend.) That morning, you try every quick remedy you can find on Google to help alleviate the pain, with perhaps some Aleve and weed. Sound like the typical college student's weekend?

Now I'm not saying that all college students are functioning alcoholics; that's simply untrue. I'm saying that not all, but many students (and party people in general) binge drink chronically to the point of it being dangerous, and that's what Lamar was trying to say with the hook of the song.

But why do people do such things to their body repeatedly? In the first verse, Kendrick mentions a couple common reasons: sadness, the euphoria of intoxication, or maybe just to fit in, which was his reason. He even mentions how he grew up around alcoholics, referencing his granddad with his golden flask. But I think it's the chorus of the song that, when analyzed, is something both deep yet shallow on the surface.

It's here that people create the perception of the song being all about drinking. If you heard this at a college party, you'd hear a whole bunch of drunk people singing along to this part because it's the most catchy bit and because it seems to encourage what they're doing. However, what Lamar is actually doing is putting his view of alcohol in various metaphors.

The beginning is a reference to his experience with peer pressure and drinking. And if you think about it, peer pressure is very prevalent. Sure, no one is going to force you to drink, but during a party, you're constantly encouraged to drink and seen as somewhat of a party pooper if you don't drink at all. He then uses the swimming pools metaphor to describe how alcohol is often used: People don't drink at parties to get tipsy. They drink to get fucked up.

Parties are built on the question of "How much alcohol do we have?" We often buy comical amounts of liquor and beer to get absolutely obliterated. What we do, according to Lamar, is we get a swimming pool full of liquor, and we dive in it. Where do people "flock" to? Wherever the liquor is, right? We run toward the alcohol as an escape from the troubles of today and "drown" away our sorrows.

For the sake of length, I'm going to stop the analysis here. If you want to continue to give the song a look yourself, I highly encourage you give it another listen and look at the lyrics a bit. Make sure to listen to the extended version as well.

I just wanted to do this song justice with this article. Lamar's intention goes even further as the beat sounds like various instruments playing underwater; it's simply a beautiful song. Along with doing the song justice, I wanted to give you a different lens to look at rap from. If you listen to rap on the radio, it's easy to be turned off and think it's a joke when you hear a rapper talk about such stupid things. It actually says something when Kendrick Lamar, a lyrical rapper, has to disguise his message of widespread alcoholism in a catchy and supposedly ignorant chorus. Rap still has great lyricists, believe it or not, you just have to look for them a little harder than you used to.